Spending on PC support
Eighteen months ago we employed
two specialist PC technicians. It costs about
one and a half to two times somebody's salary to employ them.
Guess the salary of a skilled PC technician, multiply that by
three or four and divide by your estimate of how many staff we had eighteen
months ago.
Now compare that with the cost of your desktop PC.
And your own time?
A 2000 study
by Lt. Col Alvin Lee USAF
showed that the average member of the USAF Air
Education Training Command spent
9.3 hours
per month fixing his or her
own IT problems and another
9.2 hours
per month helping coworkers with
their IT problems. [Source: Technology
Excellence in Government 2000]
Estimated annual Total Cost of Ownership
of a Desktop PC
| Economist: | $6,400
|
| Forrester: | $8,200
|
| Fortune: | $9,000
|
| Gartner: | $7,000
|
The majority of this
is reckoned to be the so-called "soft costs"
(i.e., ones that don't appear on anybody's budget)
of end-users spending their time fixing their IT.
The basic proposal
At the moment every desktop PC is a one-off. We propose doing
the same as every
organisation that pays for its staff's time: trying to buy a standard
high-quality business
desktop PC which can then be fitted with our individual
choice of CPU, RAM, disks, DVD drive(s), monitor(s), etc, and which
comes with a three-year on-site warranty. This should
allow us to buy machines which are customised to individual
needs whilst still being easier to maintain.
Doing this means that we solve any problems related to any particular
platform just once, rather than once per machine.
It also
allows us
to buy centrally-funded spare machines that we can swap for any
broken machines to get you back to work right away.
Finally, swapping your hard disks and peripherals
into a spare machine will be hugely helpful for solving those
hard-to-diagnose problems.
There will always be requirements such as
that can't be met by these machines. That's not a problem
provided that whatever we do, including this policy,
is science-lead.
Why do this?
If you've never worked out what we were spending on IT support
look at the panel on the right. Worse, still, if you've never
thought consciously about how much time you spend on IT
look at the second panel.
Supporting people, not platforms
